“How is your thesis going?” Mike gets asked this question before he is asked how he’s doing, or how does he feel now that his sister is getting married. “Good, I’ve almost finished it” he lies. Mark is thirty, he’s a photographer and things are not going well. His older siblings are married, have kids and jobs.  It seems like they are doing well, but it is only what it seems. Durinng a wedding celebration, the miseries and isolation of a high class Austrian family are brought into the light. And Mark feels isolated.

‘The Wedding’ travels the emotional paths of every ‘good family’ to display superficiality of appearances. At an event as (apparently) happy as a wedding, everybody is worried about everybody else while trying to pretend they are doing ok. The older brother pretends to be the father figure of the family, the sister pretends to be happy to have the family together, and the ex-girlfriend pretends to be content with her relationship and her pregnancy. Mark, as a spectator, is tired of pretending.

Thanks to an exquisite setting, director Sebastian Mayr connects perfectly with the generation that was told that if they did what they believed in… everything would be alright. Mark is a photographer and in ‘The Wedding’  he transports us to his world from the very first frame: we see pictures of the character’s past hanging from his room wall while we hear the sound of a 35mm film crackling, viewing a scene the character is starring in: the prodigal son wanders around his sister’s wedding.

Born in Salzburg in 1983, Sebastian Mayr studied Communication Science in Salzburg, Vienna and Malaga. He started working in the film world at age 18 and in 2009 he enrolled in the Filmakademie Wien where Michael Haneke works as a professor. From him he seems to have acquired a taste for destroying the social façade.

‘The Wedding’ is part of the Official Section of the 10th Edition of the International Medium-length Film Festival La Cabina that will take place form the 16th to the 25th of November at the Filmoteca de Valencia.

THE WEDDING | Sebastian Mayr · Austria · 2016 · 40 min.